Those Who Cannot Remember the Past…
…are condemned to repeat it — George Santayana
I’ve lived long enough — nearly 80 years — to recognize patterns that younger generations often miss. Among them is the tragic, recurring rhythm of war and destruction. It isn’t just a lesson from history books; it’s one my family has lived through for generations. If George Santayana was right — and I believe he was — we’re dangerously close to repeating one of history’s darkest chapters.
The 20-year cycle of war
Historians William Strauss and Neil Howe popularized a generational theory that describes a recurring cycle in history every 20 to 21 years — an ebb and flow of social moods, upheavals, and crises. While academics debate its rigor, I’ve found it eerily resonant. Not in abstract terms, but in lived reality. For me, this cycle isn’t theoretical — it’s a pattern written in uniforms, service, and memories of friends who never returned home.
Newer generations have stopped believing it could happen again… but somehow, that is when it does.
A family marked by war
Both of my paternal grandparents served in France during the First World War. That conflict, with its ghastly trench warfare, chemical weapons, and unthinkable casualty rates, was a turning point in modern history. It decimated a generation of young men and left Europe physically and psychologically scarred. The trauma ran so deep that Western society vowed to never allow such a thing to happen again. They determined to make it “the war to end all wars.”
But it wasn’t. Just one generational cycle later — barely two decades — another, even more catastrophic conflict broke out: the Second World War. It remains the deadliest event in human history. My father and all my uncles on both sides of the family answered that call. My father, who served again in the Korean War, carried the weight of those experiences for the rest of his life.
And then came Vietnam. That war belonged to my generation. I served in the rice paddies of Southeast Asia — not because I was naïve or unaware, but because duty meant something when your country calls. Because I had grown up in a house filled with the ghosts and values of earlier wars — I knew what war was. I didn’t glorify it — but I understood its context.
Vietnam, for all its pain, was not a world war. And that distinction matters.
The peace between the storms
The reason Vietnam did not spark another global war lies in the cautious, deliberate work done by leaders who did remember history. The post-WWII alliances — NATO in Europe, the American-Japanese security agreements in Asia — weren’t just diplomatic niceties. They were structural barriers to war. For nearly 80 years, those alliances have kept the world’s industrialized nations from turning their differences into WWIII.
They worked because their architects had seen the worst of human behavior. Many had served, or lost loved ones, or spent their youth under the shadow of Axis expansion. They understood that peace doesn’t happen by accident — it has to be constructed, brick by brick, and maintained across generations.
These alliances aren’t perfect.
But they have done what no league or treaty before them ever could: hold off another major war for the better part of a century.
Willful amnesia in the Oval Office
And now we come to the present. The current president of the United States — born just five days before me — has lived through the same historical moments. But unlike my family, his family avoided the wars that shaped the modern world. No uniforms. No funerals. No sad visits by officers and clergy from the military. No cultural memory of the cost of conflict. That vacuum matters.
Without that grounding, he sees war not as horror to be avoided, but as a rhetorical tool. He sees alliances not as hard-earned achievements, but as obstacles to personal power. He undermines NATO, scoffs at multilateral cooperation, and cozies up to authoritarian regimes that prey on weakness and division.
It would be easy to write him off as ignorant or egotistical. But that misses the point. He’s dangerous not because he remembers history and rejects it — but because he doesn’t remember it at all. The lesson has never been imprinted on him. And that makes him capable of stumbling — gleefully, even — into a catastrophe he can’t comprehend.
A future tipping toward the past
This isn’t alarmism. It’s history rhyming again.
We have entered another inflection point. Alliances are being weakened. Global trust in U.S. leadership is eroding. Strongmen and nationalist regimes are emboldened. In Asia, in Europe, and in the Middle East, the fuse is already burning. All it will take is a spark — perhaps a miscalculation, perhaps a provocation — and the delicate web of global peace may unravel.
It has happened before.
The First World War began with the assassination of a relatively minor political figure. The Second began with appeasement and economic collapse. In both cases, hubris and short-sighted politics turned manageable crises into apocalyptic conflict.
Are we really so sure that it cannot happen again?
The responsibility of remembrance
My generation is fading. The veterans of WWII are nearly all gone. Even Korea and Vietnam have slipped out of the public consciousness, replaced by movies, memes, and misremembered mythology. And yet, those of us who still carry the weight of those memories have a responsibility.
We must speak.
We must remind our fellow citizens — and especially the younger generations — that peace is fragile, that history is not abstract, and that leadership unmoored from memory is a grave danger. We must tell the stories — of trenches and beaches, of jungles and deserts — not to glorify violence, but to make it real. To inoculate the public against the casual nihilism of men who treat war as a political strategy or a ratings boost.
Hope in resistance
All is not lost. There are still those in government, in the military, in the press, and among the public who do remember. There are citizens organizing, veterans speaking out, and diplomats quietly working to shore up what they can of the old alliances. They deserve our support, our voices, and our votes.
Because if history teaches us anything, it’s this: war doesn’t return because we forget facts. It returns because we forget feelings — the heartbreak, the trauma, the unbearable finality of loss. The president may not feel those things. But we can. And we must.
George Santayana warned us more than a century ago: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” That warning was not aimed at historians. It was meant for citizens. It was meant for us.
And now it’s our turn to remember — for the sake of the innocents and the children who will suffer if we don’t.
